Documenting the research and production of interactive network based media. By David Wolf
Click image to play (28Kb Quartz Composition in QuickTime wrappper, requires MacOS 10.4)
MPEG 4 - h264 version (1.9Mb) Requires Quicktime 7 or alternative player such as VLC.
Quartz Composition file (64Kb) - Open in Quartz Composer to see how it works or move to ~/Library/Screen Savers/ to use as a screen saver.
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, vidget
Today I played live visuals for Legs For Fish at Thornbury High school. Kent Macpherson from the band is a music teacher there and organised a performance / presentation for the kids from music, media and IT classes. We played three improvised AV sets and the kids seemed not to hate it 
As Paul from the band said, it makes you acutely aware of how self indulgent this sort of improvised performance is when are doing it in front of a room full of kids who aren’t necessarily there by choice. Some of the kids seemed to dig it and some asked some good questions. “Why do you do this?” “What does it mean? The pictures just looked like colours and shapes.”
I used the Quartz Vidget I prepared for the Liquid Architecture gig in July as it works fairly well and made it easy for me to show the kids what I was doing without the confusion of showing a huge messy Quartz Composer patch. After each set we took questions. I showed how I can grab any two video files or sequences of still images and mix them together, manipulating colour, brightness, contrast etc. as well as layering multiple copies over each other. After the second performance I showed very briefly how Quartz Composer works by dropping in a video file, connecting it to a Billboard and then running it through a couple of effects.
Looking back at the QC presentation I gave at Electrofringe after this one I realise I should have shown heaps more examples and started much more slowly in Newcastle. Assuming no prior knowledge meant I explained things much more clearly, and I introduced things in a much more logical order (having slept the night before also helped!).
I’ve been back in Melbourne for a week now and have started to catch up on some sleep so its time to reflect on the past couple of weeks’ gigs and event.
On the 27th and 28th of September I performed as part of Kiss my after effects, an experimental video art festival which is part of the larger Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005.
On the 27th, after much last minute tinkering, I provided visual accompaniment for Null Hypothesis (aka Elaine Carter) who played a set of crunchy industrial beats and glitchy tones. Parts of my old Quartz Composer patches refused to work on my new laptop (I think I had a second ‘Video Input’ node hidden somewhere in a macro-patch, connected to nothing which prevented my use of live video in) so I ended up using my old computer with an older patch and copied my newer images across. The set ended up going pretty well, visually based almost entirely on sequences of still images manipulated and fed back upon themselves. I really like the effect of adding in a layer of video feedback over the images so that the highlights bleed out and move across the screen. I’ll post some examples of how this looks soon.
On the 28th I played two sets with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and Soul Mirage (Simon Gorman), also as part of KMAE / Melbourne Fringe Festival. For the first set I played audio and video simultaneously with Adrian on feedback electronics and Simon on keyboards. I used pretty much the same video set up as the night before and found the task of playing both audio and video a bit overwhelming. I would either get lost concentrating on the audio and realise that I hadn’t changed the video for 5 minutes, or fade myself out of the mix and focus only on the video. It was an interesting exercise but far too stressful to allow for good improvisation. I don’t think I want to try it again any time soon. For the second set I focussed on audio only (playing with ableton live) and felt an enormous sense of relief and freedom in contrast. I was able to listen to what Adrian and Simon were playing much more easily and improvise without having to ‘think’.
After the gig Adrian and I started the long drive up to Newcastle for Electrofringe…
It’s coming up on that time of year again. Electrofringe is a new media arts festival held in Newcastle as part of the This Is Not Art arts festival. Lots of good stuff on and definitely worth the trip.
This year I’m presenting / performing the following:
Realtime Video Manipulation using Isadora and Quartz Composer
“Introduction to the use of two software platforms which allow the creation of realtime video installations which can respond to the audience or other available data.”
This will be a introductory ‘tips and tricks’ panel presentation with Luke Toop (Adelaide), Steve Huon (Melbourne), Khalid (Melbourne) and myself. I’m probably going to focus on the basics of how create a Quartz Composer patch and then turn it into a stand alone application with Xcode and a little bit on network access and RSS etc.
Spac{v}e dpwolf vs Doktorb Robotnik
A live improvised AV performance with my frequent collaborator Doktorb Robotnik. Audio and video feedback crossed with data pulled from the network in real time. Followed by a discussion.
Re - Imagining (live) Video - Narrative
A panel presentation / discussion with Jean Poole and Anna Helme.
From the blurb:
“Audio has been easily sampled, processed and manipulated live for decades. Although hardware and software now allow video to become just as malleable, it is used in a limited number of ways. How can current-day video tools be used to composite video at live events differently? How can theatre and storytelling better integrate live video? What storytelling possibilities lay beyond recreating cinema, music videos or ‘wallpaper’? How do live video and sound work best together? What video is most worth having live?”
Technorati Tags: Electrofringe, Quartz Composer
Yesterday I finally finished setting up a website for The Guild of Commercial Filmmakers, a film production company where I work.
The site is powered by WordPress and makes extensive use of customised templates, css and custom fields. The design is by Nicole Dominic, sliced up and css/xhtml-ised by me.
One of the main functions of the website is to present an easily update-able show-reel of the company’s work (primarily TV ads). Some of the tricks I discovered whilst making the site may be of interest to the videoblogging crew or others wanting to use WordPress as a content management system for video. The next step is going to be working out how to customise the site’s RSS feeds to include this information.
For each of the ads I make a regular post, storing a lot of information in custom fields, such as: the url of a thumbnail image; the url of a poster movie and the url of the movie itself. I store this information here rather than in the actual post text in order to separate content from styling and presentation, allowing me to refer to the same clip in a number of different ways from different areas of the site.
Hmm, nothing like retro-promotion… this happened a few weeks ago.
Friday 26th of August: A night of live AV performances with dpwolf and David Sevo, Bits of Clay and Canvas City at Glitch Bar & Cinema in North Fitzroy.
David played an ambient set of prerecorded tracks mixed with musique concrete style found sounds and samples and I projected very abstract, fluid, generative images created using analog to digital feedback through realtime effects in Quartz Composer.
I had just been down to see the excellent white noise exhibition at ACMI and was inspired by the ideas of abstraction on display. Curator Mike Stubbs’ essay on the exhibition is definitely worth a read: white noise : a leap into the light.
Here is a quick diagram which shows how my setup was plugged together:
The video output of the laptop was connected to both the analogue input of the MiniDV camera and the projector. The FireWire output of the video camera was connected back into the computer. Displaying the DV signal from the camera through colour controls and halftone line filters, back out through the computer’s video output I created a feedback loop. Rather than using mouse based on screen controls as I have with previous Vidget setups, for this performance I chose to use a MIDI controller with 8 knobs and 8 faders. This gave me much needed ‘hands on’ control so I was able to manipulate the feedback by adjusting various patch variables.
Click image to play.
Here is a fairly large (29 Mb), long (8 min) video created playing around with the setup in preparation for the gig which should give some idea of how it looked. This kind of play is an important (and fun) part of my research.
The video is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license however the music is copyright .
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, vidget
The main tools of trade when using Quartz Composer are patches. Each of these modular objects has a particular function when plugged together to create flows of information. For example a patch may import or download an image, calculate a mathematical operation, affect an image or function as a switch, selecting between other patches and signals. This flow ends up rendered on screen by a renderer patch.
While you can plug these patches together in almost any way, until recently you could only play with the patches Apple has included in the program by default. You could not create your own. This meant that while QC talks directly to the graphics card and renders all images as OpenGL surfaces, users were limited to rendering onto flat surfaces, spheres, cubes and a teapot shape.
Recently ClockSkew worked out how to enable disabled patches and write your own custom patch. With this information ?? at Quartzcomposer.jp developed a custom patch which allows you to load 3D Studio Max objects into Quartz Composer and render images onto their surfaces.
Via Roger Bolton: Quartonian » Custom patches for Quartz Composer now a reality. Follow the above links for all the downloads how-tos.
I’ve been playing with rendering onto 3D Studio Max .3ds objects in QC for the past week or so but have had mixed results. The fighter jet model included by ?? works well but most other objects I’ve found online have either crashed QC or rendered incorrectly. I’m sure these issues will be worked out down the track.
Here is a quick demo Quicktime movie showing the fighter jet model in QC with cloud effects generated via particle systems based on this smoke effect by Noise Industries.
Click image to play (1.9Mb, 30sec Quicktime).
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer
_grau is an excellent 10 minute experimental animation directed by Robert Seidel. Lush, fluid images. Stills don’t do it justice. Available in 50 and 150 MB versions.
From the site:
…_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds…
Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS X is a handy little application which converts and demuxes mpeg streams. I found it a few weeks ago at work when I needed to recompress a large file from a client to put up on a website. By itself Quicktime Player will only export the video of a muxed mpeg file. MPEG Streamclip is designed specifically to convert mpeg 1 or 2 files to Quicktimes, or split them out to separate video and audio files (mpgs, m2vs, ac3s and aiffs). Very handy and free!
Template_Cinema is a collection of “low-tech movies made from existing data appropriated in realtime from the world wide web” by London artists Thomson & Craighead.
The works feature live camera feeds from various locations around the world accompanied by haunting mp3 scores, again appropriated from elsewhere online. Whilst beginning with film leader and ending with credits, these ‘templates’ are filled different every time they are viewed. Some are fixed views, others controlled by unknown ‘directors’.
The Template Cinema project began in 2002 with a networked installation: Short Films about Flying which featured live views of an airfield, snippets of audio from online radio stations and text from message boards.
In my own work I am interested in combining this is the sort of work (network/database cinema) with the real time malleability of sound art and VJ performance.
Also worth a look are these net.arty Web specific artworks and gallery works by Thomson & Craighead.
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